ACORN considered name change

ACORN, the troubled community service organization, recently considered changing its name in a bid to rehabilitate its image, according to an internal memo obtained by POLITICO.

The document, which will be released Tuesday as part of a Republican congressional forum on ACORN, illustrates the internal deliberation the group has undergone after a year of embarrassing scandals.

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The document was found in Dumpster outside of an ACORN office in San Diego, a House Republican aide said. Derrick Roach, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for statehouse in California, took thousands of documents last week from the trash outside the office. An ACORN spokesman confirmed the veracity of the document.

ACORN has been tripped up by voter registration fraud allegations and an undercover investigation which had its employees offering advice on how to set up a brothel and evade taxes. Congress passed, and President Barack Obama signed, a law that cut off much of the organization’s federal funding.

“Our members are having a vigorous discussion about how to move forward most effectively to help working families win living wage jobs, stop foreclosures, and strengthen neighborhoods,” ACORN spokesman Scott Levenson said in a response to inquiries from POLITICO.

In an emailed statement, Levenson brushed off Tuesday’s Republican hearing.

“We believe their time would be better spent solving, as ACORN is doing, the foreclosure crisis,” Levenson said.

The memo addresses, in bullet-point format, the pros and cons of a new brand, saying that it has “spent 39 years building the reputation and track record of ACORN.” ACORN officials write that the bad image would “blow over” in the next year or two. And they believe that even with a name change, “right-wing attackers will say we are ACORN in disguise – so do we really gain much by going with a new name?”

The group does acknowledge that working with elected officials “is much harder now” and “while some foundations are still will to fund us, more are not.”

The one-page document also discusses the optics of a name change, saying it “should be very obvious that we are not going to choose a new name because funders or politicians want us to.”

The memo also acknowledges that it has encountered organizations and individuals who want to work with group but “can only do so if [ACORN changes] its name.”

“(W)e should probably think through this problem carefully and figure out what it all means for our ability to survive and thrive without losing a lot of ground over the next year or two,” the memo reads.

This week, Republican Reps. Darrell Issa of California and Lamar Smith of Texas are holding a forum on the ACORN, which will include state government officials and a former ACORN employee.

“The more we learn about the inner-working of ACORN and its affiliates, the more apparent it becomes that this organization is intentionally structured to deceive and mislead the American people,” Issa said in an emailed statement.